Gaming at the Edge
Our Software Engineer Jaafar and VP Community Melissa may disagree on whether Battlefield or Call of Duty is the best FPS, but both have a thing or two to say about lag.
If you’re new to the edge community, chances are you’ve heard a bit about killer use cases that edge will unlock on a global scale. One of those is gaming, but we’re a long way from a flawless user experience, and our requirements are growing. We’ll be looking at the move towards distributed compute through edge clouds, and where gaming sits on this compute spectrum.
Taking Gaming to the Edge
Gaming is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. On a global scale, the gaming industry was valued at $162.32 billion in 2020, and this figure continues to grow year on year. From PC gaming to consoles, through to smash-hit mobile games, we’re a world of more than 2.69 billion gamers, and the games we play are becoming increasingly connected and global.
How has the rise of cloud, and more recently innovations in edge computing, transformed the gaming industry? Let’s take a look at some of the ways distributed computing has, and will, drive the future of gaming opens up a variety of use cases to consider.
Most processing is done locally on game devices, with minimal processing taking place in the cloud — that’s because it can be pretty unreliable, especially when you have lots of different parties interacting via the public internet — which is technically close to the edge already.
We tend to avoid the cloud given the sheer geographical distance at which public cloud data centres are located: this equates to limitations simply based on how quickly data packets can travel, and the unreliability of the path that this data takes. All of which leads us back to processing being done locally, leading to steep hardware costs and avoiding a battle over good servers at the global level.
Tackling Lag
Computer games have become increasingly sophisticated as time has moved on (we’re a long way away from the 16-bit games of the 1990s). As the games we engage with have evolved, technology has struggled to keep up with our demands as gamers.
We’re mostly all familiar with lag, where there is high latency between the action of the player and the response from the gaming server. This often results in a frustrating user experience and the inevitable ‘rage-quit’ that comes with delays. One of the main reasons for high latency is the geographical location between the player and the game’s servers and it will be expensive for game studios to cover a big part of the earth.
Edge fixes this by making it easier and cheaper to deploy their game servers on an edge node nearest to big player bases. This promises an improved user experience, and opens up the opportunity to enable a whole new generation of games to engage with. With edge computing, data is processed more intelligently, leading to a better gaming experience and a faster reaction time. While data isn’t necessarily processed more quickly, responses are returned to the user faster.
Edge means that clients have to use less guessing where players are with UDP packets, and can even increase the tick rate that a game server operates on. Infrastructure providers and operator platforms can choose to share edge nodes to support this, meaning a smoother service for online multiplayer games.
Flexible Gaming
A few years ago, you had the choice of playing a game on your computer at home, or on a handheld device. Now with the flexibility of edge computing, you no longer have to choose.
This means that you can in theory start a computer game at home and take it out with you when you travel without worrying about high latency affecting your performance and changing network speeds. We can offload processing from gaming devices onto the network, while significantly improving the user experience and quality of streaming.
It also gives players a lot more freedom, as they don’t have to be constrained by having to sign into Wi-Fi to ensure a strong gaming experience. The growing availability of distributed computing means that games are not only becoming faster, but more reliable.
Reliable, wearable Gaming
Gaming is becoming more open and accessible to all, and wearable technologies have a pivotal part to play in this. Over 400 million wearable devices were shipped worldwide in 2020. From smartwatches and fitness trackers to Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, wearables allow us to play games on the go, as well as immersive ourselves directly into virtual worlds.
The growth of edge cloud computing (and the 5G network) means faster connections, allowing wearable technologies to evolve and develop. This also reduces the price of the technology, meaning that more and more people can take advantage of it in the future.
Edge capabilities also reduce the processing requirements of AR games, helping them perform better and preserving battery life too. With edge cloud technology, data only needs to be processed once before streaming to multiple people in the same location. Edge offers better reliability for games that need to call up to the cloud for multiplayer scenarios, supporting a range of gaming use cases, which are as diverse as the people playing them.
Exploring Mobile Gaming as a Service
Supporting gameplay which is device agnostic, and removing the disk size limitations that device specifications are shaped by, is a huge milestone for mobile gaming. In this use case in an edge environment, an end-user would make a request to start a virtualised device or streaming game session from a mobile gaming as a service partner client application, such as Hatch.
The edge cloud would deploy an instance of the virtualised device or streamed game session, and instances of that virtualised device or a streaming game session are deployed in the localised host edge network. The end-user can then run intensive games on a basic device in a fully virtualised environment, allowing for a rich user experience and interactions and play streaming games from their handset.
Edge Player-vs-Player Matches
A single point of integration for Gaming Studios allows for real time automated decision per match, and decision making for workload placement based on player telemetry. Granular location based match-making. Session context taken into account to drive the auto-deployment per instance
A Game Client requests to join a match to the game studio servers. The game studio would interact with an edge gaming matchmaker partner, capable of determining the best grouping of users. The edge gaming matchmaker partner sends a real-time request to the edge cloud to deploy an instance of a game server in the most appropriate location for user experience. With an instance of the game server deployed by the edge cloud provider into a host edge network, multiple game clients can now be connected to a localised game server instance, offering them the best experience possible for the whole duration of the match.
By playing on the edge, players can reserve local private servers and enjoy the games with their friends with near zero latency.
Looking at Massive Multiplayer Edge Gaming
A global platform can provide a single point of integration for gaming studios to support massive multiplayer gaming. This requires a shared scaling persistence to support scaling shared worlds: in order to support millions of entities and thousands of global players, we need to simplify managed operations for large-scale gaming deployments.
Game studios require solutions to prepare games to run a multiplayer edge gaming operating system, one that deploys an instance of the OS. Instances of the operating system with populated game studio assets are deployed across multiple locations, and are able to scale and manage shared resources. Multiple game clients become connected to automatic scaling, with a shared gaming world hosted through multiple instances of the OS.
Edge computing can do a lot to improve the gaming experience, making everything behind the scene happen smarter, faster and more efficiently. With the rise of new technologies and buy-in from the companies present from the cloud to the edge, the future of online gaming is looking more competitive than ever before. At Ori, we know that working with the different layers of infrastructure between on-premise and the cloud is hard and expensive. That’s why we’re simplifying it — join our Slack community to find out more.
And as a final note, Battlefield has better servers and lower lag.
